


Muse of Protection

by NevillesGran



Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Freeform, OT3 cuddling also appears, many other characters appear but they aren't the point
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-12
Updated: 2015-08-12
Packaged: 2018-04-14 06:59:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4555137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NevillesGran/pseuds/NevillesGran
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So many people forgot what it meant to be a muse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Muse of Protection

**Author's Note:**

> Definitely partly inspired by the fourth story in Khilari and Persephone_Kore's "Agatha's Bad Plan" series.

In every body she had ever been given, Otilia stood guard. She had stood at her King’s back as he held court, wings folded gracefully and hands on the hilt of her sword, and held the same pose for centuries at the side of the Heterodyne Girl’s tomb. She had watched over Lucrezia’s son in his cradle, loathing her new body but unable to scream or hit someone or do anything else that would disturb the slumbering child. She had spent sleepless nights prowling the halls around the Wulfenbach school, ready to leap claws-first upon anyone who would dare threaten the children therein. And now she was back in Castle Heterodyne, a giant cat by a fire, not drowsing but rather alert for any sign of danger to the three children taking a well-deserved rest in the bed at her back.

She stood guard faithfully, because it was her duty. Yet it was not the purpose for which she was made. So many people forgot what it meant to be a muse. They watched Tinka’s lithe movements and giddy leaps and thought she embodied Dance, or listened to Hermia expound on the household customs of Ancient Grecia and believed her nothing but a repository of History. They saw Otlia’s sword and assumed she was meant to offer Protection.

They were not wrong. But what they missed, time and time again, was the way Hermia’s eyes lit with enthusiasm when her listeners joined the conversation, or the way Tinka laughed as she spun and beckoned her watchers to follow her jumps, however clumsily. They did not think that Ascelia lectured on taking medicine because she wanted them to care for their own healing, or that Moxana’s advice was so unclear not just because prophecy was an arcane art but so the recipients would to think things through themselves. They forgot Otilia’s sword was for instruction rather than true combat.

Even her Creator had forgotten his original purpose for them, she thought privately, as did her King, when they ordered her to keep the Heterodyne Girl “safe.” But she had done her duty, though there was no one to inspire in the dark Heterodyne crypt. She had done her duty and stood guard for two centuries by the Girl’s tomb, until Lucrezia stole her body and chained her mind and gave her a new charge to guard.

It was so like Lucrezia to set her up for a failure that, though she had seen the woman stumble out of the rubble with red, shocked eyes and clothes streaked with blood and dust, Otilia couldn’t help but wonder if it hadn’t all been a cruel joke.

She had gone mad for a while then, though it was not sparking or even normal human madness. She was simply consumed by an overwhelming sense of uselessness. Purposelessness. She had failed everyone, every task she’d ever been given. Her Creator was gone, and her sisters scattered to the winds, unprotected and lost. Her King was dead and his kingdom lost. The Heterodyne Girl was dead (not safe) and unwatched (not _safe_ ). She had failed even her latest, loathed charge, Lucrezia’s son (the loathing was for the mother, not the child; he had been innocent and helpless.) And no one, not a single person left in this endless chaos of the Other’s War, seemed interested in protecting anyone but themselves. She had failed in every way possible, and so she lashed out, and was locked away.

Then Klaus Wulfenbach had come and, with a show of kindness and confidence and the faint air of a man exposing his bare neck to the enemy, offered her a new boy to look after. He was neither her Creator nor her King; he had no claim on her loyalty and obedience. But neither was he Lucrezia, and Otilia was desperate, and the boy was bright-eyed and trusting in a world full of danger. Lucrezia had made her unable to introduce herself properly, or any way at all, but she thought Wulfenbach must have known somehow, because no sooner had she accepted the charge of his son than he admitted that there were more, a handful of children then but he had hopes for a whole school in the future, who would need not just protection but guidance, and education.

Otilia could not teach as her sisters had. She could not dance or sing or draw, she did not know the paths of the stars or the stories of long ago or the secrets of the future and how to guess them. But she could teach the use of a sword, or an axe or a spear or anything else, and she could teach the Baron’s philosophy of protecting a fragile peace. Oh yes, she could teach that. The sensations and restrictions of her body tormented her daily, as did the loss of her sisters and the failures of the past, but she was the Muse of Protection and even her King had never given her a school of children to guide and inspire in the ways of duty, sacrifice, and safekeeping. She looked after them all, and she was _never_ late to class.

Then the Heterodyne Girl returned, a new one but the same commands applied—even moreso than before, thanks to Lucrezia. In both ways. Painfully, predictably, she drew Otilia’s boy into danger. (She was scrupulously fair with the many boys and girls she had received charge of in the last several years, but only one had been given first, in confidence, and he always had priority in her mind and heart.) To nobody’s surprise, the new Girl broke the Baron’s fragile peace, shattered it as thoroughly as her ancestress ever had. Yet also, along with Otilia’s boy and a few more of her most unruly students, she relieved Otilia of Lucrezia’s chains and gave her yet another body, a Heterodyne creation again but this time commanded by no one to whom the Muse did not grant the right.

As if on cue a new Storm King stepped forward, and Otilia accepted him more for her boy’s sake than his own, because he spoke boldly and dispelled her old bindings but he wore no crown and held no kingdom. But he _listened_ , where her first King had so often ignored the oblique advice she and her sisters had to offer, and that was something. He had, after all, been one of her students for a time.

Then there was fighting, and the Doom Bell ringing. (She remembered the first time she had heard it, as the Heterodyne Girl betrayed her King on their wedding day, and the many times after that, echoing deep in the darkness and empty despair of the Castle crypt. But it did not make her cringe in this new body, didn’t shatter her soul in the least, and her boy was laughing with delight.)

They froze and unfroze, the Girl to the rescue again (and Klaus Wulfenbach had some things to _answer_ for this time.) There was more fighting and shouting and even flying, reunions unlooked for and losses uncalled for. Until finally, somehow, Lucrezia was dead for good and the Bell rang its deafening, demoralizing victory peal once more. Otilia felt nothing so much as invigorated.

That night, this night, here in the center of the Castle on the heights of Mechanicsburg, it was for once redundant to stand guard over the Heterodyne and her consorts. Otilia’s concession to logic was to lie like a sphinx as she watched over her children. After two hundred years, they would always be children in her eyes, even in the morning when they woke up and stepped out to rule their new Europa. And they would always be hers: her King who’d returned to her, whom she had taught, however briefly, who had checked the room for assassins before anyone else followed him in. Her boy who’d been given to her, whom she’d raised, curled around his companions as if to make himself a shield even in sleep. And the Heterodyne Girl, whom Otilia had chosen to trust this time, who clutched them both close around her and had a death ray perched on the headboard programmed to auto-fire at anyone who dared try to wrench them from her grasp.

Otilia, Muse of Protection, cautiously thought that perhaps this time, she had not failed anyone. It was a good experience. She intended to repeat it.


End file.
